Chameleon turns your Raspberry Pi into a retro gaming arcade

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The Raspberry Pi has already proven itself to be a very capable little and cheap PC. It runs Linux, can be used for development, surfing the web, and playing games. Those games include retro classics through the use of multiple emulatiors that have been ported for the board.

A few weeks ago we saw a Macintosh Classic turned into a NES arcade by using a Raspberry Pi. In that project the guy used RetroPie to give a nice graphical front end to his new arcade machine. But there is now an alternative, and one that’s arguably much easier to use.

It’s called Raspberry Pi Chameleon, and it consists of a remix of the Raspbian Linux image. The remix removes the X graphical environment and replaces it with a launcher dedicated to running a number of emulators. At the same time, the software used remains open source.

The systems supported include the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, DOS, Windows 3.1, arcade games, Oric-1, Apple II, ScummVM, and the Atari 2600. And to use it, it’s simply a case of having a spare SD card and downloading the Raspberry Pi chameleon torrent to put on it.

The version available at the moment is v0.1, so it’s likely the creator, Carles Oriol, will continue to update the functionality and add more retro system support to the line-up. And because the Raspberry Pi is so simple in its design, getting new versions means just replacing the image on your SD card.